CatOps – Telegram
CatOps
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DevOps and other issues by Yurii Rochniak (@grem1in) - SRE @ Preply && Maksym Vlasov (@MaxymVlasov) - Engineer @ Star. Opinions on our own.

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Another cybersecurity post.

A few days prior Log4j storm, researchers from Orca Security discovered CloudFormation vulnerability and managed to get access to an internal account. It means that an attacker could potentially get access to any AWS account by mimicking CloudFormation API calls.

Previously, Orca Security research team managed to do something similar with [AWS Glue.

Kudos to AWS team here. They managed to fix this vulnerability in less than 25 hours and it took 6 days to populate the fix in all their regions.

#aws #security
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Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a powerful framework that allows you to validate your data structures against some policies, written in Rego. There are multiple implementations of OPA for various tools and systems e.g. Gatekeeper for Kubernetes.

However, you can write your own implementation and use if, for example, for unit tests. This articles provides some examples of how to write your own OPA checks in Go.

#programming #opa
Microsoft in its blog reviled some details on the recent cyberattack on the number of Ukrainian governmental websites

Investigation is still ongoing. However, we already know that attackers have overridden Master Boot Record (MBR) on infected machines. Microsoft also published hashes of malicious software in the same blog article.

I also found information that hackers initially broke through a proprietary Content Management System (CMS) tool. However, I haven’t found any official proofs of it.

#security
After I published my article about Kubernetes backups, I got some questions regarding cluster organization and maintenance procedure. Specifically about managing Kubernetes clusters “as cattle” and this statement:

…*investing in cluster automation early on* is important. You may end up in a situation when you need to re-create a cluster from scratch.

I started writing an article about managing clusters “as cattle” to address these questions. Moreover, that was my initial plan. However, I realized that I have very little exposure on how other people are managing their clusters! I have only the perspective of my current and my previous employers.

Thus, I decided to issue a survey on how people are managing their Kubernetes clusters, their core components like CNI, Ingress, etc., and business applications.

I would appreciate it, if you can spend some time filling up this survey. You can also reach out to me directly and share your story of managing Kubernetes in your company. I left contacts in that Google form.

Here’s the link to that article about backups, in case you missed it.

Have a great week, y’all!

#kubernetes
The channel denoscription says "... and other issues", right?

So, today I want to share with you WSJF model of SAFe framework, which helps to compare priorities of different projects. WSJF stands for "Weighted Shortest Job First".

This concept won't be new at all for the product people and project managers. And this is exactly why I want to share it here. Through my career, I saw a lot of examples, when platform teams or OPS teams didn't have their dedicated product/project manager. Therefore, there were a lot of struggles in what to prioritize among multiple projects.

I saw this framework in action and I think it's useful. Ofc, this is not a silver bullet. You may need to make a few tweaks to the process here and there, but in general this is a good start if you're not sure what you should pick up next from the pile of platform work.

#management #agile #safe
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Not so long time ago, I shared with you a tool called Acra for encryption/decryption of sensitive data in a database. This tool is written in Go, and obviously it uses TLS.

Now, they have written an article about TLS implementation in Go, specifically about the implementation of OCSP and CRL extensions.

This article would be interesting for you, foremost, to get some ideas on OCSP and CRL extensions and their use cases. Secondly, if you need to implement TLS in your apps or advise on the implementation to your developers.

#security #programming #go #tls
If you haven’t read a Roblox’s postmortem on October‘s 73-hour outage, you definitely should!

Even though this event happened in October, the postmortem was released just a few days ago. And in this case, this is a very good decision! Especially, because this write up provides a detailed analysis on what happened at that time and what chain of events caused that.

It‘s cool to read postmortem the next day after an outage - we are all curious human beings. Unfortunately, those postmortems usually they are lacking many details. This is understandable: it‘s not enough time for a thorough analysis, also your team is probably already tired.

In this case, though, you can have a detailed overview of what happened as well as plans to prevent this chain of events happening again. Moreover, with some plans already implemented.

It‘s a pity that not may companies do similar postmortems. And I must say that this is probably in their disadvantage either. After reading this document I have a feeling that Roblox is a cool place to work, TBH.

#postmortem #hashicorp #consul
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RedHat presented their own minimal Kubernetes distribution targeted at edge devices - MicroShift.

Functionally, MicroShift repackages OpenShift core components into a single binary that weighs in at a relatively tiny 160MB executable (without any compression/optimization).

As a monolith, it provides an “all-or-nothing” start/stop behavior that works well with systemd and enables fast (re)start times of a few seconds.

So first of all, you can now install OpenShift on a Raspberry Pi as a single binary. Secondly, your car will probably run Kubernetes in the nearest future.

#kubernetes #OpenShift #RedHat
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And another security update comes from Let's Encrypt.

Let's Encrypt will revoke all active certificates that were issued and validated with the TLS-ALPN-01 challenge before 00:48 UTC on 26 January 2022. Because of a bug, those certificates are considered mis-issued.

They estimate this is <1% of all active certificates, so it's not that bad, though.

#security #tls
Some Friday material.

This short article is a perfect analogy for programming and systems design in general!
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Information from our chat.

Be careful committing to SOPS for your secret management.

It looks like they're looking for maintainers at the moment, which means that this project is not supported right now to a degree it was before.

P.S.: If you want to share any interesting information, feel free to join our chat! Although, keep in mind that a mix of Ukrainian and Russian is used there.

#security
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​​​​​​​​​​​​HUG Kyiv #13: Q/A session with HashiCorp co-founders in 1 day!

When: Thursday 3rd February, 19:50 (Kyiv TZ)
Where: Online
Language: English

Feel free ask and vote for questions here

#event
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This post will be interesting to those, who run Java application in Kubernetes. Specifically, if you use OkHttp client for Java.

Kubernetes network load balancing using OkHttp client - the name speaks for itself. Basically, the problem is that OkHttp uses persistent connections to communicate with the peers. Therefore, IPVS - the default K8s load balancer - is unable to properly balance those connections. Thus, you may have all the connections served by a single replica of your downstream service!

This article provides some useful insights on how to trace down this issue and how to fix it in your code, as well as it mentions tradeoffs of such fix.

#kubernetes #java #programming
Docker Desktop had already became a paid option for corporate users and not all the companies are willing to pay. Some just haven't bought the licenses yet. This is bad news for Mac user stations, which are likely a majority in the corporate world.

However, there are projects out there, which aim to solve the problem of virtual machine to run your Docker containers.

This article tells a story of migration to Lima from Docker Desktop on MacOS.

There is also a complimentary project with a funny name - Colima, which simplifies the migration even further.

#docker #containers
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